Adding value to Ugandan bananas

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 5 March 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The fruit is a beloved staple of the African country's cuisine, and a key export.

But is there a missed opportunity when it comes to Ugandan matoke, or bananas?

We speak to entrepreneurs who are making banana wine, fertilizers and hair extensions - adding value for local and international markets.

Produced and presented by Zawadi Mudibo

(Image: A man drives a motorcycle carrying matoke in Kampala, Uganda in June 2024. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service.
0:05.2	I'm Zawadim Dibbo.
0:06.7	Today, we're in the heart of East Africa.
0:09.3	Uganda, where nestled among rolling hills and lush green valleys lies a crop that pulses with life and promise, the banana.
0:18.4	You might know it as a fruit to eat, but in this program we'll hear about the other
0:24.3	business possibilities. I believe that the future of textiles is in banana stems. So I want to look
0:31.6	into a future where the farmers are harvesting the fruit, processing the stem, and taking the fibers into a textile meal.
0:39.4	From turning bananas into hand-woven textiles to making them into drinks.
0:45.6	As you know, bananas is not the easiest thing to process into wine.
0:52.4	And that's why you don't get a lot of people making wine from bananas, essentially because of that.
0:59.7	We uncover a world where bananas are not merely consumed, but revered.
1:06.6	Banana, particularly the green variety called Matoki or Plantain, serves as a food security
1:13.6	crop, an income source, and a cultural artifact among other benefits, and it could bring big
1:21.0	rewards.
1:21.6	We have got to add value and make sure that we get products that can earn for an exchange.
1:28.3	Like the dehydrated banana in form of planting in in form of upper bananas
1:35.1	can earn a lot of money from European countries.
1:39.2	Adding value to bananas, that's all coming up on today's business daily.
1:56.5	Enthusiastic voices of customers in this restaurant off the busy Bukoto Tinder Road,
2:04.0	enjoying a hearty meal of banana Luombo, a traditional Ugandan dish of a sauce and various ingredients wrapped in a banana leaf and steamed.
2:07.4	From serving as a vital source of nutrition in times of crisis,
2:12.2	to offering a steady income for farmers.
	...

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